The Nevada Conservation Corps goes to...Arizona?

As I mentioned in my last post, this past week my crew went to Arizona for our project. I'm not sure if other crews have gone there in the past, but it seemed quite unusual to me because I didn't think we would ever leave the state for any of our projects. The reason we did was because we were working with Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which is located in both states, and it just so happened that the work they needed us for was over the border. I wasn't complaining though because it meant that we got to see another amazing place that I never expected to see. The scenery where we were working was breathtaking because we were right where Lake Mead NRA meets Grand Canyon National Park. The work we were doing was road decommissioning and installing barriers to keep people from off-roading in the areas we were closing off, and for the entire week anytime we were working we could just glance up and see the mouth of the Grand Canyon where the river flows out of the Canyon and meets up with Lake Mead. You can't ask for a better view than that while you're at work. It's things like that that are constantly reminding me how lucky I am to have a job that allows me to be outside so much seeing new places and having new experiences.

One part of the experience recently that has not made me feel quite as lucky is the cold weather. It did get colder much more gradually in Vegas than I am used to from New England but usually it is slightly colder than Vegas in the areas where we work, and this week was no exception. I don't know exactly how cold it got during the nights but it was definitely below freezing (which was quite apparent when the milk in my cereal began freezing to the side of the bowl while I was eating breakfast). Sleeping in weather that cold can be quite uncomfortable, so I've taken to sleeping with all of my layers on, including hat and scarf, and using my sleeping bag liner inside my sleeping bag to add more warmth (this past week Corey lent me his liner also so I had 2 liners in addition to my sleeping bag), then pulling my sleeping bag over my face to keep it warm. My feet also get very cold during the night so my strategy for that is to put hot water in my metal water bottles before bed and stick them in the bottom of my sleeping bag to warm up my feet. Unfortunately the heat usually dissipates completely by around 3:00 am, but for those first few hours my feet stay wonderfully warm. The morning also presents several challenges of it's own, other than frozen milk. Since we have to wake up before dawn it hasn't started to get warm yet so getting out of the sleeping bag can be a challenge, although sleeping in our Carhartt work pants instead of changing into more comfortable pajamas makes it slightly easier because you don't have to undress or put on freezing cold pants in the morning. The boots are a different story though. There is no good way to keep boots warm during the night, even if they are inside the tent, so putting my boots on in the morning can feel like putting my already-cold feet into ice boxes. Then breakfast involves trying to eat as quickly as possible so I don't have to expose my hands to the cold for too long, and then on the last morning of the week when we have to pack up our tents it can be a difficult choice between trying to finish taking the tent down without gloves on before your hands are completely frozen or fumbling with the buckles and clasps wearing gloves and possibly taking twice as long. On these cold mornings it can be a blessing when the worksite is far enough away to require driving because then we can put the heat on in the truck to warm up. As much as this might sound like a terrible situation to deal with, and sometimes it feels pretty terrible, it's worth it because it's all part of the experience. If there were no challenges the job would not be as rewarding, and by the end of this year of service I will feel very accomplished being able to say that I lived in a tent most of the year in all types of weather.

I realized that I haven't written many posts specifically about what our experience is like at camp when the work day is over, so hopefully this post gives you a little bit of an idea of what camp life has been like recently at least. I'll try to remember to add some more about camp life in future posts. This week we have a 6-day project (my crew will be working with 3 other crews at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area doing trail maintenance), and then we get 2 weeks off for Christmas! I'm really excited for the break because I've been missing the east coast a lot recently so I'm looking forward to going back.

Pictures and update from the past few weeks

As promised, here are some pictures from the Ash Meadows project and my Grand Canyon trip. It took me a little longer than I thought, but better late than never, right? Here they are.

Ash Meadows:

This is a really bad picture of Devil's Hole, where those endangered fish live that I mentioned in my last post. We could only see if from a fenced in walkway above the hole so that we weren't disturbing the fish. 

This is inside the facility we toured where they are doing research related to the Pupfish. That's me in the picture to the right. 

This is one of the amazingly beautiful springs that are all over the place at Ash Meadows. They are breath-taking!

Big Horn Sheep!

Grand Canyon (these are a little out of order, sorry):

It was snowing where we camped for the night. This is what it looked like in the morning when we woke up. 

The place we camped, on Forest Service land outside the park. 

The edge of the Grand Canyon. We couldn't see down into it because of the snow. 

During our hike. 

At the bottom. I was so excited!

Another shot from the beginning of the hike when it was snowing. 

Lunch break

Yay Grand Canyon! 

Another snowy shot

This is when we just got to the river. I really like this picture. 

Our campsite at the bottom of the canyon.

Now for an update of things since the last time I wrote. The project after our Grand Canyon trip was at Desert National Wildlife Refuge, which is only about an hour from Vegas. We were there for 4 days, which has started to feel really short compared to working for 8 days, and we worked on putting down concrete on a wheelchair accessible trail and removing Russian Olive, an invasive tree. We got to use chainsaws for the tree removal, and it was really cool because I felt like I had a breakthrough in my comfort with using a chainsaw, and I got to the point where I didn't feel the need to ask my supervisor, Corey, what I should do before making each cut, and he felt comfortable letting me work without watching me the whole time. 

That weekend my roommates and I went to Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. We camped there one night and spent the next day doing some hiking, and even though it was a short trip we got a good taste of the beauty of the area and how cool the rock formations are there. Here are some pictures from that, although they are from Facebook so the quality isn't great, and as always pictures never quite do the place justice. 

The week after that we got even more chainsaw experience because we spent most of an 8-day project using them. We started out the week in Alamo, NV, using chainsaws to remove invasive tamarisk, or salt cedar, and then spraying the stumps with Garlan, a pesticide designed to kill the roots when it gets soaked in so the tree can't re-sprout. We did that for 4 days, but then on day 5 it started to rain and get too windy to safely use the chainsaws and chemicals, so we moved to the next project site in Carp, NV, where we spent 2 1/2 days building a barbed wire fence to prepare an area for invasive removal and native plantings. Then we went back to the first site for the last day and a half to finish that project when the weather improved. That week was usual for several reasons, first of all having to move our campsite twice because of the weather changing our plans, and we were also working on private land. Usually we work on public land but this time we were working with a woman from the Fish and Wildlife service who works with private land owners to do conservation projects on their land. So it was a different experience because we got to meet the landowners, one of which was quite a character. It was also the most difficult project we have had so far for many reason. It was the first time we had spent multiple days in a row using chainsaws for the entire day, and by the end of the week my entire arms were in pain and my hands kept cramping up, especially while I was sleeping. Then even when we weren't chainsawing for those few days, I thought my arms and hands would get a break, but having to hold onto the barbed wire to twist it around posts and things like that made my hands cramp up even more, so by the end of the week I could barely do anything and had to stop using the chainsaw for the last few hours because I couldn't even grip it without being in pain. It was also some of the worst weather we've had on any project. It rained for about 3 days, and the first day it rained it was really windy too and when we got back to our campsite my tent had blown about 10 feet from where I had set it up and the wind had driven rain into one side of it under the rain fly and the bottom half of my sleeping bag was wet. So that night I had to sleep curled up in a tiny ball in the top half of my sleeping bag to avoid getting my feet wet. Even though the conditions were not great, my crew did a great job of staying positive and keeping each other motivated. We had several nights where we ate dinner in the truck and just sat there for a while being completely ridiculous and silly, and I think that is what saved us from letting the bad weather and hard work get to us. By the end of the week though I was ready for those 6 days off!

For the 6 days off I went to the San Francisco area to visit the Hanley cousins for Thanksgiving! It was great to see all of them, and I was glad I was able to spend the holiday with family even though I'm so far away from home. On Thanksgiving morning I ran the Turkey Trot 5K with Terry and Will, which was really fun, and it was the first race I've run in so it was a great new experience! Over the weekend I also got to see a friend from college, Julia, who I hadn't seen since graduation, and it was great to catch up with her, even only for a few hours. It was a great trip, but then on Sunday I had to take a 13-hour bus ride to get back to Las Vegas, so I didn't feel very rested when I had to go back to work the next day. Luckily the work this past week wasn't hard, so it was a good recovery week after 2 weeks of not much downtime, but I wasn't as into it as usual because I was looking forward to being back in Vegas and just getting to relax and catch up on everything I hadn't gotten to do in the 2 weeks before. The project was at Ash Meadows again though, which is one of my favorite places we've worked, so it was still a fun week. We were removing Coyote Willow, which normally isn't something we'd remove because it's native, but Ash Meadows is removing it because it's been growing near water in several places and shading out important fish habitat. It's an interesting situation because they basically had to choose between two species that they normally would want to keep, but in this case the fish won because they're threatened or endangered, I can't remember which. We were using loppers and handsaws this time because we were mostly just taking out small sprouts that had come up since the previous treatment, so it wasn't physically hard, which was good because my arms were still recovering from the chainsawing we did, and we got to hang out with Abram and Will, two guys who work at the refuge who are really fun to work with, so over all it was  fun week but I was really happy to get back to Vegas and relax this weekend. I haven't done anything exciting this weekend but that's fine with me, I've just relaxed and gotten errands and things around the apartment done that I've been putting off. 

Then next week is another unusual one because we're going to Arizona. Interesting since we're the Nevada Conservation Corps, but we're working with the BLM on Lake Mead land so it's an area that crews have worked on before, it just happens to cross the state line. Then after that we have one more project where we're working at Red Rock Canyon, and then we have Christmas break. I'm really excited for that because I've been getting homesick recently and I can't wait to go home and see family for Christmas. I will try to write again at least once before Christmas, but I can't guarantee anything based on how infrequently I've been finding time to write. If I don't write before then, Happy Holidays everyone!

Ash Meadows and the Grand Canyon

Yet again it's been a while since I've posted so I have several weeks that I need to update you all about. I think the last thing I wrote about was chainsaw training, which now seems like such a long time ago. The week after that since the government shutdown was still happening, we went to our fallback project which was trail building in the Spring Mountains. That was a decent week, but since trail building isn't exactly my favorite thing to do I didn't have as much fun as I might have at a different project.

The week after that was great though. We had an 8-day project at a National Wildlife Refuge called Ash Meadows. It's a beautiful place in the middle of the desert a few hours from Vegas that has many different types of landscape in a fairly small area, including beautiful springs. I don't think I have ever seen water quite as clear as the springs at Ash Meadows, and it had lots of amazing colors in it from the algae and other things growing in it. Unfortunately since I still have no camera I don't have pictures of the area, but I will hopefully have some soon because I'm planning to copy some from the hard drive at the office. My plan is that my next post after this one will be all of the pictures that go along with what I'm writing about now.

Another great thing about this project was the variety of work we got to do. Especially since it was 8 days if we had been assigned to one task for the whole time it would have gotten tedious, but we go to do road decommissioning, invasive cattail removal, trail maintenance, fence repair, and even a little bit of chainsawing! The refuge staff also gave us 2 different educational opportunities by first showing us several sites around the refuge, and also giving us a tour of a new science facility that they are using to try to raise an endangered species called the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The fish is also endemic, which means that Ash Meadows is the only place on earth where it is found, and within the refuge the only place it lives is a body of water called Devil's Hole, which is basically just a hole in the side of a mountain that is not very big but is so deep that no one has ever found the bottom. There are only 35 of the pupfish left in existence right now, so the refuge got special funding to build the facility where so far they haven't brought any of the Devil's Hole Pupfish, but they have been doing experiments with a related species of pupfish to see how likely it is that if they removed the fish from Devil's Hole, they would be able to successfully breed and raise them. It was a cool facility and fascinating work but it also made me wonder how worth it is to spend millions of dollars trying to save this one species of fish that doesn't interact much with the rest of the ecosystem. I'm not saying I'm strongly for or against it, it's just an interesting issue to think about.

After our project at Ash Meadows we had 6 days off, so 3 of my coworkers and I decided to go to the Grand Canyon. It was amazing and so much fun! It was my first trip to the Grand Canyon, and like many other things since I've arrived in Nevada,  it was completely different from my expectations, and way better. We started off our trip by taking much longer to get there than we had anticipated because of making multiple stops along the way to buy food and gas, and by the time we got to the park it was closed, so we decided to camp on the Forest Service land next to the park because they allow camping anywhere on the land unlike the Park Service. There was snow on the ground at this point and it was pretty cold, so we made a fire to sit around while we ate dinner and then 3 of us decided that we would sleep in the car instead of outside, although one of the guys I was with did sleep out in the cold. The next morning, I got up around 6am because I was getting very uncomfortable not being able to stretch my legs out in the back of the car, and around 7:30 we got on the road again for the last 15 minutes of the drive to the canyon. It was snowing again, which was something I never expected to see when I went to the Grand Canyon. At first we were worried that the snow would interfere with our hiking plans, but we went and talked to the ranger working at the backcountry permit office and he said that once we got into the canyon and began descending it would get much warmer. So we got a permit to camp for 2 nights in the canyon, and set off on our hike. We spent 3 days hiking from the north rim of the canyon down to the bottom and then back up. Altogether we hiked 28 miles, 14 the first day down to the bottom, and 7 each of the other days on the way back up. The first day it took us longer than we anticipated to hike all the way to the bottom so the last hour and a half of our hike were in the dark, which was a little scary and we were all getting pretty tense because we just wanted to get there. But we eventually made it to the campsite, which was really pretty and had nice sand for us to sleep on so it was very comfortable even though I had not brought a sleeping pad. In the morning we walked to the Colorado River and explored a little bit before starting off on our 7 mile hike halfway back up the trail. This was the easiest day because that part of the trail is pretty much flat, so it was nice to have that sort of restful day between the really long downhill and the really steep uphill 7 miles we did the day after. I thought the last day would be incredibly hard and that it would take us all day, but it ended up taking us about 6 hours, which was shorter than I was expecting. It was hard, but it was so worth it, and when I got to the top I felt so accomplished. That was definitely the most hiking I had ever done and it was amazing! Now I really want to go back there and hike rim to rim, which is actually fewer miles than what we did but it would be cool to see the south rim as well. I also want to go when I came see the view from the top of the canyon. I went to an overlook on the rim but it was still snowing at that point so all I could see was snow, which in itself was cool, but I didn't get the typical view, which I would like to see sometime.

This past week we had another 4-day project, and this one was a local like my crew did several weeks ago, which means instead of camping we came home every night. I was a little disappointed because I wanted to be camping, but it was less weird than our last local because we were working with another crew this time. We spent the week mostly doing planting which was fun, as well as some road decommissioning. It was cool because we got to see some more of what is right outside of Vegas, places that normally we would never think to go. I'm getting used to the landscape around here for the most part, but it does still amaze me how beautiful some of the mountains and rock formations are around here. The weather still throws me off a lot though, especially when we go from somewhere really cold back to Vegas where it's still a comfortable temperature to wear a t-shirt. It doesn't feel like November because I can still wear flip flops and no coat and I'm perfectly comfortable. I was even getting hot in the desert where we were working this past week, so I think my body still thinks it's September. It also doesn't seem possible that time is going by as quickly as it is. It's hard to believe I've been here over 2 months now.

Anyway, that's my update for now. Like I said, I'll try to post the pictures that go along with this post sometime in the near future.

Government shutdown and chainsaw training

The government shutdown has now been going on for 2 weeks, so I'll start by talking about how that has impacted our projects. At the start of our work week 2 weeks ago there was a lot of talk about how the potential impending shutdown might cause us to be pulled from the projects we were working on, but we were sent to those projects anyway hoping that things would work out. The project my crew was at the week was at a place called We Thump, which is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land about an hour south of Vegas. It was a really cool area with lots of really old Joshua trees, and the work that first day was planting native plants, which was fun because planting is a nice change from the killing invasive plants that we often do. The first thing we did that day was go to a nursery near Lake Mead to pick up the plants, and then when we got to the worksite, the project partner had set up a tour of a ranch for us. The ranch was called Walking Box Ranch, and was owned by Clara Bow and Rex Bell. It was really cool to hear about the history of it and see all of the old pictures of the two of them and their family that were hung all over the house. Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of it since I did not have a phone at that point, and even now that I do I haven't figured out how to get pictures from it onto the computer, so you'll have to forgive the lack of pictures in my posts for a while. It's going to be very frustrating for me to not have pictures to remember all the cool places I'll be going in the near future, but hopefully I can get pictures from other people until I can get a smartphone again.

After that we got started on the planting, which took us the rest of the day. Altogether we planted over 100 plants, which was almost all of the plants we had picked up from the nursery. Then we went to our campsite, which was so cool because it was in the middle of a huge area of Joshua trees, and that night was pretty much the perfect temperature to sleep outside. The sunrise the next morning was beautiful as well, but then when we got up we learned that the government had indeed shut down and that we had to leave and go back to the office. So we sadly packed up and drove back to Vegas and spent that night at our apartment. The next morning we went back to the office and were sent to a different project, which was a project 2 crews were already working on and it was the only one that wasn't cancelled. Somehow we were able to keep working there because it was Forest Service land that we had an existing grant to work on, or something like that. That project involved trail building at the same trail we practiced on at orientation, and even though the 2 days we spent there were good, it wasn't as fun as the project we'd been working on originally.

Luckily this past week our plans were not impacted by the shutdown because we were already scheduled to do chainsaw training, which didn't involve working with a government agency because the organization that runs our AmeriCorps program was paying for it out of pocket. So we spent a week in a place called Indian Valley about 5 hours from Vegas learning how to use chainsaws, which was fun. We spent the first 2 days learning about proper techniques and how to maintain the chainsaws, and then on the third day we finally got to actually use them. I'd used a chainsaw once last year when I did a day of informal training, but this training built on what I already knew and allowed me to get even more comfortable with it. It was fun, but since there were so many of us all being trained at once it involved a lot of standing around waiting while other people used or maintained the chainsaws. It was also really cold the first 2 days of actual chainsaw work, which made standing around even less fun. It also snowed, which was cool since I like snow, but I was not expecting it to be quite that cold and I didn't think I would see snow this early. Many of my preconceptions about Nevada have been proven wrong since I got here, most of them relating to the weather. I guess I had the idea that most of the state would be similar in weather to Las Vegas, which I can now see was clearly wrong. By the end of the week it got a little bit warmer again, but the last (and most beautiful) day we were there we only got to chainsaw for an hour before we had to leave. Overall it was a good week, but it also showed me that I need to start being more prepared for the cold.

My roommates and I also experienced snow this weekend when we went hiking. The process of finding somewhere to hike was more difficult than we thought because the first 2 places we tried to go were closed because of the government shutdown, but we eventually found a trail in the Spring Mountains, which is the same range where we did the trail buiding project during orientation and 2 weeks ago. It's right outside of Vegas so, again, I was not expecting it to snow, even though I now knew to expect that it would be cold. Almost as soon as we started the hike it started snowing, but it wasn't as bitterly cold as it was during chainsaw training so it was very enjoyable to hike through the snow and look up and see the mountains clouded in falling snow. We hiked 2.5 miles and found a rock alcove where we decided to camp for the night. By this point it had stopped snowing and the sky was clear, and it was a beautiful night to be out in nature. Then we got up this morning and hiked back down, and it was perfect weather to hike and enjoy the scenery. Again, I wish I had pictures, it was beautiful.

Since the government is still shutdown, our schedule continues to get messed up. This week my crew was supposed to go to Desert National Wildlife Refuge, which is near the Spring Mountains very close to Vegas. But instead, we are going back to the Spring Mountains to work on the same trails that crews have been working on since the beginning of the year, since that is still one of the only projects that is able to get funded. Hopefully the government shutdown will end soon so we can go back to normal. Once the government opens again we'll probably be sent back to the projects that got cut short by the shutdown initially, which I'm excited about since I really liked that project. C'mon government, get your act together!

Zion and recent projects

Yet again, time seems to be flying by and I haven't written as soon as I'd hoped. So I'll jump right in to what I left off with last time, which was the trip I took to Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah with my roommates and a few other people from NCC 2 weeks ago. It was sort of a last minute plan and at first I wasn't going to go because after our 8-day project all I wanted to do was stay home and relax, but visiting Zion was on my "Vegas bucket list" so I decided to go. And I'm so glad I did! I'm pretty sure Zion is the most beautiful place I've ever been. Or at least it was the most breathtaking. Don't get me wrong, the east coast has many beautiful places as well, but since I grew up there I'm much more accustomed to the landscape, so whenever I go somewhere new in the Nevada area it's amazing to me because it's so new and different. We got to Zion around midday on Friday and left around midday on Saturday, and in that time we did 3 hikes. The first was called Hidden Canyon, which was a mile up a developed trail and then you could continue onto the area that was not maintained and required scrambling over rocks and through tight spots. We went about another mile or two past the maintained part of the trail and then turned around when we coudln't figure out how to get past a certain area. Here are some pictures of that hike.

This picture is not from that hike, but I took it as we were first entering the park.

The view that greeted us when we got off the bus at the place where the Hidden Canyon trail starts. This picture doesn't do it justice. 

The view from the top of the mile-long developed trail. So beautiful!

The scrambling begins

Stone arch around the area where we turned around. 

After that we hiked the Watchman trail, which started near the visitor center, and one of the rangers had recommended it for sunset because of the nice views. It was a pretty easy hike, I think about 2 or 3 miles roundtrip, and the view from the top was great. It was hard to get pictures of the sunset but here are a few that I did take.

View from the top

When we got back from that hike, it was time to find somewhere to camp for the night. This was harder than we had anticipated because we hadn't gotten to the park earlier enough to get one of the campsites there because they fill up really fast, so we were going by one guy Jeff's recollection of campsites from when he'd been there before and internet searches on people's phones to find somewhere that would be nearby and open. One place turned out not to exist anymore and we couldn't find the other one, so we just went by information found online to try to find a place that wasn't an official campsite but was public land so we would be allowed to camp there. It involved driving up a rutted dirt road on the side of a cliff in the dark, and we weren't convinced at first that we were going the right way because it kept feeling like we were going to end up in someone's driveway. But we kept driving and eventually passed through a gate with a sign saying we were entering public land, so we knew that as long as we found a good place to stop, we would be able to spend the nigh there. We eventually found a turn off area that served as a good place to park and set up our tents. It was a beautiful night, so I slept with the rain fly off my tent for the first time, and it was awesome when I woke up in the middle of the night and all I could see out the top of my tent was stars. I really wanted to stay awake to stargaze but I almost immediately fell back to sleep. We had all decided that we should wake up to watch the sunrise, and it was probably the best sunrise I'd ever seen (not that I've seen very many because I'm usually not awake at the time of day by choice haha). It was especially cool because since we had gotten to the campsite in the dark, we had no idea what to expect when we woke up, and it ended up being an awesome place. I got some pictures, but again, pictures just don't do things like this justice. Here are some anyway, you get the general idea.

Our plan for that day was to hike Angels Landing, which is one of the most challenging hikes at the park and they say it's not recommended for people who are very afraid of heights. I was a little scared before we started, but like everything else at the park, it was amazing! The first few miles were a pretty average hike, but with some more steep parts than the hikes the day before, but then the last half mile was the hardest and most time consuming part. There were many parts where you could see down the cliff on the side of the trail, and sometimes it was so narrow that there were cliffs on both sides. For most of this portion of the hike there were chains on the sides to hold onto because if you didn't it would be very easy to fall off. It was probably coolest hike I've ever been on, and even though it was scary at parts, it was really fun. Here are some of the pictures I took.

View of the peak of Angels Landing

On the way up

View on the way up

You can't see it that well from this picture, but this is a series of switchbacks built into the side of the mountain

View as we started the hard part of the hike

The peak where we hiked to

So high up!

This part of the trail was really narrow

This is not where we hiked to, but it's a part that juts out from the peak

Same as the last picture, from a different angle

View from the top!

We made it!

There were cute little chipmunks all over the place that would come pretty close because they wanted food. 

So pretty!

The whole experience at Zion was amazing, and I hope I get to do many more trips like this during my time in Nevada. There are so many places I want to explore in the Southwest, and I want to get to as many of them as possible in the next year. I'm hoping next weekend to go to the Grand Canyon, which is on the top of my Vegas bucket list.

Since Zion, my crew has worked at the same site for 2 weeks, which was Wetlands Park in Henderson, NV. Henderson is the city right next to Las Vegas, so we didn't have to go very far and it didn't even feel like we had left Vegas. We also weren't camping during these projects, we just went home each night and met at the office each morning. That was sort of nice because it meant I got to do errands and get other "real life" things done each day after work. The park we worked in was cool, it used to just be a deserted patch of desert that was used a dumping ground, but the county decided to restore it and turn it into a park. Water runs through it which means things can grow more easily than in other parts of the desert, and it has many nice walking paths that people can explore. The main projects we worked on here were clearing views of the water to help them prepare for their school education events, remove invasive tamarisk plants, and clear cattails from a channel so water could flow more easily.

During the weekend between those two weeks, my liking for the city decreased slightly when my phone got stolen while I was at a concert. Someone opened my purse and took my phone out without me noticing, although they didn't take my wallet or my passport, which were both in my purse too. They did the same thing to my roommate Kaitlyn, and then a few hours later my roommate Jake's phone was taken out of his pocket, I assume by the same person. I've never had any issues like that anywhere else I've been, but I guess since there is so much money being spent all the time in Vegas, thieves see it as the perfect place to get lucky, which unfortunately they did with us. This makes me much more wary of going out to clubs and other crowded situations like that, and I'm definitely going to keep a closer eye on my stuff if I do go to those places from now on.

Something interesting that I've noticed since I've been here is that I've actually started to get used to the heat, which I didn't think was possible. There was one day the first week that I was at Wetlands Park that it was over 100 degrees, and I got so hot that I could barely do anything without feeling like I was going to pass out or throw up so I had to take breaks every few minutes, and I felt like I drank my weight in water trying to stay hydrated. After that day though, none of the weather I've worked in has made me feel very hot, even when it's in the 90s. So once it started cooling down this past week, it's felt really weird to me. Yesterday evening I was outside and it was 75 degrees, and I felt cold! I've definitely lost all the toughness from living through a New England winter last year. I guess I imagined that it would just feel like summer all year here haha. I'm sure I'll get used to the colder weather again, and it's nice that we got to turn the air conditioning off the other day, so we'll save money on that. I guess I'm in for a big shock when I go home for Christmas.

Our project next week is also somewhere close to the city, but not as close as the past two weeks, so we're actually going to be camping, which I'm excited about. After being in the city for two weeks I'm starting to feel hemmed in and getting some fresh air again is going to be great. I'll post another blog post as soon as I get a chance, although unfortunately until January when I can upgrade to a new iPhone, there probably won't be as many pictures with the posts because my phone was also my only camera. Each crew has a camera for documenting our projects though, so I'll try to get pictures from that camera if there are any good ones I want to share.